Four Thousand Weeks
- Author: Burkeman, Oliver
Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. — loc: 1070 ^7viuwq
But the crucial point isn’t that it’s wrong to choose to spend your time relaxing, whether at the beach or on BuzzFeed. It’s that the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart. — loc: 1081 ^v2q2d7
to have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it, at least a bit. Otherwise, are you really having it at all? Can you have an experience you don’t experience? The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; and a friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a friendship in name only. — loc: 1102 ^c7ydjv
The Paleolithic hunter-gatherer whose attention was alerted by a rustling in the bushes, whether he liked it or not, would have been far more likely to flourish than one who heard such rustlings only after first making the conscious decision to listen out for them. — loc: 1092
So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. In the words of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, they sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want.” — loc: 1138 ^fecz0j
Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else—to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared — loc: 1176
much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly. Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else—to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most. We’re motivated by the desire to try to flee something painful about our experience of the present— loc: 1175 ^nxzpqa
whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude—with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out. — loc: 1231 ^djqj9r
you face your finitude. You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality — loc: 1245
when it’s your job to care for a two-year-old for five hours straight—but they all have one characteristic in common: they demand that you face your finitude. You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality — loc: 1244
they all have one characteristic in common: they demand that you face your finitude. You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it. — loc: 1245
the internet often doesn’t feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained. — loc: 1250
“distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. The reason it’s hard to focus on a conversation with your spouse isn’t that you’re surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table. On the contrary, “surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table” is what you do because it’s hard to focus on the conversation—because listening takes effort and patience and a spirit of surrender, and because what you hear might upset you, so checking your phone is naturally more pleasant. Even if you place your phone out of reach, therefore, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself seeking some other way to avoid paying attention. — loc: 1259
the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans. It’s as if our efforts to be good planners don’t merely fail but cause things to take longer still. — loc: 1297
The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future—but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future. — loc: 1319 ^xaq91e
The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: — loc: 1331
When we claim that we have time, what we really mean is that we expect it. — loc: 1342
You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past. — loc: 1345 ^5w97jg
So a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied—no matter how much you plan or fret, or how much extra time you leave to get to the airport. You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which means you have permission to stop engaging in it. — loc: 1362 ^phiv4s
I don’t mind what happens.’” — loc: 1405
life spent “not minding what happens” is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it—and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected. — loc: 1408 ^s4byo4
is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply. — loc: 1421 NOTE: planning
The more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives. — loc: 1427 ^e7x65r
intently were they focused on using their time for a future benefit—for the ability to revisit or share the experience later on—that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself at all. — loc: 1436 ^0qttab
[People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive. — loc: 1459 ^abq5jz
wanted to know that I was doing whatever was required to obtain optimal future results in the domain of child-rearing as well. Except that this now — loc: 1491
Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. There will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. — loc: 1521 ^60jgpc
By focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase. — loc: 1533 ^cbaj6s
life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. ^dyge80
— loc: 1560
our fixation on what he called “purposiveness”—on using time well for future purposes, or on “personal productivity,” he might have said, had he been writing today—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. ^4vajsm
— loc: 1560
By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life. ^8p6luo
— loc: 1571
Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now. — loc: 1623
Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more options for how to use any given hour of free time: like anyone else, they could read a novel or take a walk; but they could equally be attending the opera, or planning a ski trip to Courchevel. So they’re more prone to feeling that there are leisure activities they ought to be getting around to but aren’t. — loc: 1660
To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else. — loc: 1665
The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation. “If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.” — loc: 1706
If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it now. ^ic275y
— loc: 1753
The other important thing we can do as individuals, in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instance. “Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,” — loc: 1795
when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning. And it makes sense that this feeling might strike in the form of a midlife crisis, because midlife is when many of us first become consciously aware that mortality is approaching—and mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any “later” left? ^toa9f2
— loc: 1828
The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not. — loc: 1851
so in order to be a source of true fulfillment, a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome. ^d97dzs
— loc: 1854
to pursue an activity in which you have no hope of becoming exceptional is to put aside, for a while, the anxious need to “use time well,” — loc: 1867
The reason that technological progress exacerbates our feelings of impatience is that each new advance seems to bring us closer to the point of transcending our limits; it seems to promise that this time, finally, we might be able to make things go fast enough for us to feel completely in control of our unfolding time. And so every reminder that in fact we can’t achieve such a level of control starts to feel more unpleasant as a result. — loc: 1913
“As soon as I slow down,” she remembers one woman telling her, in response to the suggestion that she might consider taking things a little more gently, “the feeling of anxiety wells up inside, and I look for something to take it away.” Reaching for the smartphone, diving back into the to-do list, pounding away on the elliptical machine at the gym—all these forms of high-speed living were serving as some kind of emotional avoidance. ^l3liu8
— loc: 1948
the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary. (Meanwhile, we suffer the other effects of moving too fast: poor work output, a worse diet, damaged relationships.) ^dmvuw0
— loc: 1977
And whereas if you find yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate friends may try to intervene, to help steer you in the direction of a healthier life, speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being “driven.” — loc: 1983 ^3r7byz